MIAMI -- Daniel Murphy hit a three-run homer and the New York Mets matched a season high with 17 hits Sunday to beat the slumping Miami Marlins 11-5.RELATED: Wright leads at third for ASG, but Murphy needs help
Jonathon Niese (4-4), who has been plagued by poor run support this year, won for the first time since May 22. He allowed less than four earned runs for the 19th consecutive start, giving up three in six innings.
Mets starters have an ERA of 1.74 over the past six games.Niese drove in a run with a suicide squeeze bunt, but the bulk of the offense came from higher in the order.
David Wright drove in a run for the sixth game in a row.Curtis Granderson thrived again in the leadoff spot, reaching base four consecutive times. He and Lucas Duda each had three hits.Murphy had two hits, including his sixth homer.
Kirk Nieuwenhuis, making his first start since being recalled from Triple-A, doubled twice.
Rookie Anthony DeSclafani (1-2), making his fourth major-league start, gave up seven runs in 3 2/3 innings and departed with a 7.59 ERA.The Marlins (37-38) fell below .500 for the first time since April 30. Ten days ago they had the best home record in the majors, but they went 3-7 on their longest homestand of the year, losing all three series.
The Mets had scored a total of 13 runs in Niese's previous five starts, but he led 7-0 before giving up three runs in the sixth. The left-hander then struck out Derek Dietrich with the bases loaded to end the inning and his afternoon.
Terry Collins is considering moving Curtis Granderson out of the cleanup spot, the manager said after Saturday’s game.I've been saying for years that besides David Wright, Daniel Murphy is the best hitter the Mets have--a consistent .280 to .300 guy who could easily score around 80 to 100 runs for you and drive in around 70 every year all the while playing a decent 2nd base...if the Mets just left him alone. And just looking at Murphy's career stats, he's more then proven this. But this is the Mets organization, a woeful program operated by Fred Wilpon that hasn't won it all in 28 years and here's yet another reason why. Instead of leaving Murphy (a homegrown talent who always plays hard regardless of the situation) be, the inept Mets management continue to show a willingness to screw with his head. Whether it's constantly putting Murphy on the trading block, incessantly trying him out at different positions, getting into his head when he goes through a periodical slump or in this case, panicking and moving a guy with a lifetime total of 39 home runs to the cleanup spot all because your new multimillion dollar CF is off to a bad start...it's always Murphy who gets the short end of the stick. Will they ever learn to just leave Daniel Murphy alone? He's earned that right.
Update 10:30 a.m.: Granderson will bat second on Sunday. Daniel Murphy will bat cleanup.
Granderson, who signed a four-year, $60 million deal this past winter, went 0-for-5 earlier in the night. He left six runners on base.
New York Mets right-hander Matt Harvey has elected to undergo Tommy John surgery that will sideline him for the entire 2014 season, general manager Sandy Alderson said Friday.Easily the right decision. There's essentially a 50/50 chance that Harvey returns to his original form, but even that's better than his chances if he'd gone with rehab IMO. Now the Mets should sign definitely Dice-K to a one-year deal, at the very least.
Dr. James Andrews will perform the procedure later this month.
Harvey had been steadfast in saying he planned to rehab and undergo a throwing program over a six- to eight-week period in order to be able to pitch next season with a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.
Alderson and other team officials, however, had portrayed that strategy as an uphill battle and regularly had suggested surgery was the likely route.
The GM indicated Friday night that Mets doctor David Altchek and Andrews agreed that Tommy John surgery was the prudent route, although they also were willing to let Harvey try the throwing program to disprove the need for the procedure.
"Based on the conversations that I had with both of the doctors, I felt this would be the right decision," Alderson said. "So in that sense I'm happy Matt has reached the same conclusion."
Harvey reached the surgery decision without ever going to the Mets' complex in Port St. Lucie, Fla., to begin the planned throwing program. He recently had been getting physical therapy at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan.
The New York Mets are preparing for the baseball season, and the team's owners will have to prepare for trial.RELATED: $83M question: Will Wilpons lose Mets?
U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled Monday that Mets principal owner Fred Wilpon, his family, businesses and charities must pay as much as $83.3 million to the trustee trying to recover funds to net losers in Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme. He also ruled that the sides will go to trial March 19 over an additional $303 million that trustee Irving Picard is seeking.
Of the approximately $83 million, only $1.7 million is associated with Mets accounts. The rest is associated with other Wilpon businesses and charities.
The Wilpons' lawyers had filed a motion to have the case tossed entirely, but that was rebuffed by Rakoff in Monday's ruling.
"We are preparing for trial," Sterling Partners, one of Wilpon's holdings, said in a statement. "We look forward to demonstrating that we were not willfully blind to the Madoff fraud."
As a matter of law, Picard had contended, he was entitled to $83,309,162 in Ponzi scheme profit allegedly made by the Wilpons in the immediate two years before Madoff's arrest on Dec. 11, 2008.
The Wilpons had asserted that because they thought they had $500 million invested with Madoff at the time his scheme was discovered by authorities, they actually were losers -- despite withdrawing more money than they had deposited with Madoff.
Picard believes he also is entitled to $303 million in principal invested by the Wilpons with Madoff because, he alleges, they had warning signs a fraud might be occurring. Rakoff has set a high standard for Picard to be able to collect principal -- "willful blindness," meaning the Wilpons would have had to all but have known something was awry with Madoff and purposely looked the other way.
Rakoff wrote in Monday's decision that he is skeptical that Picard can prove to a jury that the Wilpons acted in bad faith with respect to their investment with Madoff, but Rakoff decided the trustee had enough evidence and witnesses to allow him to try to attempt it at trial.
"The Court remains skeptical that the trustee can ultimately rebut the defendants' showing of good faith, let alone impute bad faith to all the defendants," Rakoff wrote in Monday's decision. "Nevertheless, there remains a residue of disputed factual assertions from which a jury could infer either good or bad faith depending on which assertions are credited."
